Topic

Reason

Reason in this collection is less triumphant than its Enlightenment advocates would prefer. Voltaire's bluntest entry — prejudices are what fools use for reason — identifies the most common counterfeit. Bacon's impossibility-of-loving-and-being-wise-simultaneously is the classical complaint: reason and passion are not complementary but competitive, and passion tends to win. Jefferson on spending money you don't have is reason applied to practical life. Hemingway's instruction to always do sober what you said you'd do drunk — that will teach you to keep your mouth shut — uses reason as a disciplining force on impulsiveness. Wilde on never marrying because it's the only reasonable position applies reason to commitment: taken too far, it counsels against almost everything. What the collection suggests is that reason is most valuable not as a faculty for arriving at abstract truths but as a check on the specific irrationalities that govern daily life — the debts you shouldn't contract, the things you shouldn't say, the commitments made in states you'll regret.